General Question in Cloning

Well, there's not many ways to do cloning. One way is to use scripts, and the other is to set a group to automatically clone after it's complete. And I bet there will be large companies using both methods.

I'm a big fan of avoid scripting as much as possible, but I have customers where I can do this, and others were I can't. Usually, how you're going to handle the clone tapes, and who do you have monitoring NW will play a major role on this, at least this is what I see when talking with my customers.

Tell us a bit more about your need, do you have a lot of clone operations? Do you have another team that will handle the tapes (i.e., take it from the library and move to another building)? How do you, and who, verify if the clone operations were successful?

Apart from the cloning you are doing, you can also do cloning of individual volumes through the Media->Volumes screen. Select the volume, right click and select Clone Volume...you would be prompted to select the Clone pool and cloning will start.

Thanks for the reply Daniel and Anuj...

I am just eager to know how others are implementing Cloning.. This a why i asked this question...

To Answer Daniel question, We will verify the cloning results by a email . We will receive any email once the cloning completes and i am the one transfer the cloning tapes to the diffrent site.

Hi,


In the world of Networker, you only have a couple of options with automated cloning - run the clone immediatly after the backup completes or some form of scripted approach which runs outside of the backup window.

I prefer to run cloning from some sort of housekeeping script that runs post backup and outside of the primary backup operations. This is for a couple of reasons -

Primarily to keep the tape devices during the backup operations free for exactly these BACKUPs

Secondly the scripted approach allows more control of what is cloned, where and what retention overrides are applied.

HtH

IKP

Thanks for the reply IKP.. It definetly helps me....

Deepak,


I am currently working in a large environment and we use the script method for several reasons. Currently we are cloning over 9 TB per day and once we are done consolidating all of our systems to NetWorker we will clone about 28 TB per day.

1. Allows us to control what gets cloned and when
2. We can clone some larger jobs to special clone pools as needed. This helps with DR recovery so there is no tape contention while doing the restore in a DR since only the large job is on that tape.
3. Every day the script will send us how much has to be cloned and a completion report.
4. We can throttle our clones by the number of jobs running at one time. The script we are using checks the number of clones running by process and will then only start a new clone once one job is done. The is great for bandwidth issues.
5. The will start when we want it to in order to make sure that backups are done before cloning starts ensuring that we get the backups done at night and the clones during the day.

I hope this helps you in your quest.

JG

I think it needs to be said that major reason for script is performance as default cloning by NW is not smart when rn from group. Scripting give you a way to make it better. Small shops won't see this, but those bigger certainly will.